Lev Grossman

Author of The Magician's series

Discussion

Hi everyone. Lev Grossman here. I'm the author of the Magicians trilogy -- The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician's Land. They've been called Harry Potter for adults, which actually isn't a completely terrible description, though there's a lot of Narnia in there too. They're about smart, complicated people learning how to do magic, discovering magic lands, and making very poor life choices.
All three books were New York Times bestsellers. My publicist would probably want me to add that The Magician's Land went to #1. The Magicians trilogy is being turned into a TV series on Syfy—the first season is currently filming in Vancouver.
I'm also a journalist: I've written a lot of essays and features for magazines and newspapers. Since 2002 I've worked for Time magazine, where I'm the book critic.
Ask me anything

@brendan_o I recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell relentlessly. It's not cool anymore, now that it's a TV show, but I do it anyway. What else? Mrs. Dalloway, which is still my pick for greatest novel of the 20th century. At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien. Anything by Joe Abercrombie, but especially The Heroes. And all the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, by Fritz Leiber, which aren't in print anymore but really should be. Maybe we can bring them back.

@leverus Whenever I get asked to recommend a book, I almost always give the same two recommendations, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Magicians, so that's delightful to hear. Thoughts on the Strange & Norrell TV show?

@lejlahunts And then I figured out that you could reply to questions directly.
re: my next project, I really want to talk about it, since it's pretty much all I think about right now, but I can't be too specific, because we haven't even sold it to a publisher yet. It's fantasy, but it's a very different branch of the fantasy family from The Magicians. I can tell you that I'm doing a mountain of research, which is new for me. Usually I just make it all up.

@the_fillorian As far as I know, there is no Josh in the TV show. I've never asked why not, but now I'm curious. He was mostly a comic character in the books, and I can tell you that the show is extremely funny. I think all the other characters got funnier to compensate.

@Russ About the TV show, I'm happy with the progress. It's been a learning curve, I'll admit. It was a shock when other people started putting words in my characters' mouths. I'm not used to collaborating -- novel-writing is a soloist's medium. But I'm really enjoying it coming together. It turns out there are people out there who are better at writing my characters than I am.

@veronica Hi Veronica! I don't know if I ever thanked you, and Sword & Laser generally, for having me on. It meant a lot to me. And to the books -- I think a lot of people found them through you guys.
I've had what feels to me like a lot of input on the show. At least, I've written a lot of 10,000-word emails to the creators about it, and they're doing a very good impression of having read them. Obvs I don't have anything to say about set design and things like that, and I have no real actual decision-making power. But I see all the words: season arcs, episode outlines, every episode script ... they've been super-generous, considering that they don't have to show me any of that stuff, and I nitpick it all relentlessly and annoyingly.

I must say, the inclusion of Harry Potter, Narnia and other real-world references/send-ups greatly enhanced my enjoyment/attachment to the characters and the world. Ernest Cline seems to be the other popular author whose work acknowledges other fictions — but isn't it odd that the barrier between the cultural history of fictional worlds and our own is so solid? Why don't more authors include that sort of thing in their work?
(Realizing this might be an unfair question since you did break that barrier, feel free to flip it — why did you do so in such an explicit fashion?)

@thoughtbox Whoops, I skipped over this first time. This was kind of a pet peeve of mine, that no character in any fantasy novel ever (with the exception maybe of Don Quixote) seemed to ever have actually read a fantasy novel. You can't kid me that Harry Potter spent 12 years in a closet and didn't read a hell of a lot of Piers Anthony.
I get why people don't like to touch that kind of thing -- it can lead you to cutesy self-referential metafiction pretty fast. And believe me I cut a _lot_ of references out of The Magicians before I felt like I'd found a balance. But consuming fictions is such a huge part of what people do all day, I just couldn't see writing a novel that had anything to do with contemporary life that wasn't saturated with other fictions.

@galaxyalex Honestly I'm drawn to the melee side of things. Fighter, fighter/thief maybe. (Can you still be a fighter/thief? I'm still stuck in 1st edition.) Spellcasters require too much resource management. I'm must not that detail-oriented.
Dream squad? It's tricky, because good novelists don't necessarily make good D&D players ... I would recruit Susanna Clarke if at all possible. And David Shafer. Also my brother.

@bonersniper I love gaming. I used to play all the time. My former hardcore gaming self would be disgusted at my sad dilettante gaming, which mostly happens on my phone ... I just don't have time anymore.

@bonersniper That said I dunno if I could countenance a Magicians game. It would probably be like huge amounts of memorization and puzzle-solving, then after every level you do a shot. Which isn't my scene at all. I go in for hyperviolent twitch gaming. Sad but true.

And ... then it was 4:00. And I've gotta go. These novels don't write themselves. Or they do, but I have to at least pretend to be supervising. Thank you everybody for posting, that was excellent, and if there's any outstanding urgent issues, you can always hunt me down elsewhere online.